I WAS JUST ABOUT TO step in the bathtub when my phone started ringing.
I didn’t have to look at the screen to know who it was. I could count on two hands how many people had my number, and the majority were too wrapped up in their own lives to call me… the runaway. The heartbreaker. The risk taker.
“Hey, Mom,” I said as soon as I answered, reaching for a towel. It was like she had a sixth sense that told her to call me at the most inopportune moments. It had been that way for as long as I could remember.
She let out a dramatic sigh before saying, “I thought you weren’t going to pick up. I was starting to worry.”
She said that every time. I was pretty sure it was her way of making up for the years when she checked out of life, leaving me to fend for myself. Those cold years coated in confusion and melancholy.
“It rang twice, Mom. And I was just about to get in the shower, so…”
“It’s a good thing I caught you then.”
Pulling the phone from my ear, I let my head fall back with a small groan. Of course she wanted to have a chat when I was trying to wash the day off my skin.
“I guess so,” I said. Resigned, I put the plug in the tub, and then turned the water on, knowing it would be a minute before I was able to get in. The knobs were finicky, both facing the same direction. I learned the hard way the hot only needed one good turn before it became scalding.
“Well… did you call him?” she asked when she couldn’t wait any longer.
Sitting on the toilet lid, I pinched my forehead between my fingers, silently cursing.
I’d completely forgotten.
“Did you?” I deflected.
Mom made a noise under her breath. She did this every year on this day… poking and prodding me for information on my father, info she was too prideful to get herself. Sometimes, I didn’t understand her. How could she still think about someone who had completely ruined her life? How could she wonder what he was up to? It was like he took a piece of her when he left us. A piece she didn’t know was missing, but kept searching for in the information she wanted me to steal from him.
“Hartley, I’m serious.”
I sighed. “I planned on calling him after I showered,” I lied, idly scratching at the nail polish I’d spilled on the counter while painting my nails the other night. Gunmetal gray. Indifferent. Gloomy. Mysterious. Badass.
At least, that was what I wanted to project.
Calling my dad on his birthday was low on my priority list. It was down there beneath color coordinating my closet and making mini planters out of wine corks like I’d seen on Pinterest.
“I doubt he’ll answer. It will be like last year. That woman of his does her best to pretend like he never had a life before her.”
“He’s not exactly innocent,” I pointed out, trying not to think about my dad and the shit he’d put us through. But it was always there, a greedy, vile thing in the pit of my stomach dissolving every chance at happiness.
There was a slight pause, followed by a gulping sound. She’d pulled out the yearly bottle of Cabernet, no doubt. There were only two times a year she indulged in a glass or two of the blood-red liquid—my father’s birthday and the anniversary of their divorce.
“So what did you do today?” she asked, changing the subject as quickly as she’d started it.
Bear Man’s eyes flashed inside my mind. Hues of blue swirling behind my lids. “I checked out the beach, and witnessed a little girl almost drown.”
She gasped.
“Luckily, there was a man there who was able to save the girl. Estella was her name.”
“Where were her parents?” Her voice was riddled with judgment.
I stuck my finger in the water. Perfect temperature. “Her mother had gone to the car to put their stuff away.”
“Some people,” she said, and I could almost picture her shaking her head. “I swear, every generation gets worse. Parents too busy or too lazy to look after their own children. Thank God I won’t be around to witness when it goes to shit.”
I shook my head with a small smile. “Nice, Mom.”
She wasn’t listening. “Thankfully, I raised you right. I can rest at night knowing no grandkid of mine will become a little asshole. All those whiny kids I see nowadays. Glued to an electronic device. Crying when they don’t have it. Blaming everything wrong in their lives on others.”
“Well, lucky for you, I don’t plan on having kids,” I reminded her, reaching to turn the water off. I’d lived with two people who started something they couldn’t finish. I wasn’t about to put myself, or a child for that matter, in that situation. I never wanted to feel the chains of love around my neck, allowing someone else to hold the key.
I could almost hear her rolling her eyes through the line. “I still think that’s a tad extreme, Hartley. You just wait. You’ll change your mind when you’re older and finally meet the right man.”
I raised my gaze to the ceiling. She always found her way back to this subject. My mom was single-minded when it came to her plans for my future. As if men were the sole purpose women were put on this planet. Too often it was engrained in our heads that we couldn’t live a normal life if we didn’t have a man by our side and a baby on our hip. I was done waiting by the phone for a man who didn’t have the depth and courage to put me first. I wouldn’t put myself through that again. Ever.
“I’m twenty-seven, Mom, and it’s not about meeting the right man. I have a lot I want to do with my life, and raising a family was never something I saw for myself.”
“You think I saw it for myself?”
I didn’t answer. She might have forgotten who she was before Dad cheated and left, but I hadn’t. We had the perfect house. The perfect life.
And then it crumbled with one selfish decision.
“I still think it’d do you some good to find yourself a boyfriend.”
I hated that she lived her life through me. It only worsened after my parents split up. I’d become her companion. The brunt of her scattered, broken emotions. Smothered by her one moment and abandoned the next. It hadn’t gotten any better until she decided to see a doctor a few years back.
“Have you?” I retorted.
“Hell no. There’s no way in hell I’ll ever let a man run my life again.”
“Maybe you should become a lesbian then,” I said with a small smirk.
She didn’t waste any time giving it right back to me. “I just might. Maybe I already am.”
We both laughed, but the laughter was short-lived when a scream erupted from me.
“What in the hell?” Mom said.
Still shrieking, I jumped onto the toilet, trying to get as far away as I could from the god-awful thing scurrying along my floorboard.
“It’s a monster! So gross,” I shouted, searching around for anything I could kill it with. It was moving toward me at an alarming rate. Hell-bent on attacking me, I was sure.
“What is it?” Mom asked. Calm. Collected. As if my life wasn’t on the line.
“I don’t know. Some kind of huge, disgusting brown thing that looks like a roach but only a million times bigger,” I screamed as I hopped onto the counter. It moved behind the toilet.
“It’s probably a palmetto bug. You’re in Florida, honey. They’re everywhere.”
I grabbed my can of hairspray and sprayed the shit out of it, then used some toilet paper to squash it. “I think I’m going to throw up,” I said, dropping it in the toilet and quickly flushing it.
Every badass had their weakness.
Bugs were mine.
Seconds slipped by, the silence clenching back its laughter.
“Are you alive?” Mom finally said.
“Funny.”
“Hartley,” she said after a moment.
“Yes, Mom?”
“Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Being alone is something I chose, only because my time for love has come and gone. I’m finally happy inside the skin I’m in, but you… the whole world has presented itself to you. It would do you some good to open your heart to someone.
“I know… I know everything wasn’t perfect when you were growing up. I wasn’t the best example… especially when it came to men, but they’re not all like your father. The good ones are still out there, waiting.”
Her words made me itch. It wasn’t often that we talked about the ugly parts of life. I was never the child who clung to my mother’s side or crawled onto her lap at night. Human touch wasn’t something I craved. I needed space. Room to breathe. To me, emotions were like clothes. Both a necessity to wear.
But I didn’t like my clothes tight-fitting, just like I didn’t like tight-fitting emotions.
“I love you, Hartley,” she said, knowing she’d hit her limit with me of emotional talk for the day.
“Love you too,” I said before hanging up.
After soaking until the water turned cold, I got out and sat on the edge of my bed. Still wrapped in a towel, I scrolled through the numbers until I found my dad’s. He was listed under asshole, so I didn’t have to scroll far. I debated calling him. The last time he’d called me on his own was when I was sixteen, a week after my birthday he hadn’t shown up for, and it’d only been to ask if he left his favorite fishing pole in the garage.
Needless to say, we hadn’t spoken much after that.
For years, I wondered what I did that made it so easy for him to leave. I searched for the reason every time I walked away from a relationship, but always came up short.
Leaving a man wasn’t the same as leaving a child.
How could he wake up every morning and not feel the need to check on the first person he ever helped create? Wasn’t he curious about me? Did he ever want to know how I was doing? I picked and picked and picked at my scabbed memories of him. Was I too clingy? Had I cried too much as a baby? Did that one time when I was seven and complained about having to watch him play golf push him further away from connecting with me?
Mom never said it was my fault he left, but she’d never said it wasn’t either.
Compulsively, I reached for my laptop and logged onto Facebook. I couldn’t help myself. I was a glutton for punishment. He didn’t have a profile, but his new wife did. It only took a second to find her. A second I never should have taken.
There they were—his shiny new family—plastered on my screen. Smiles and hugs and laughter frozen within frames of lies he kept buried inside. They had one child together. My half-brother. I’d never met him. I doubt he even knew about me. Trevor was his name. From the pictures of his latest birthday, I saw he had just turned ten.
Though we shared different mothers, I saw a piece of myself in him. The piece that connected us. We shared the same almond-shaped eyes Dad had given us. The same smile that curved more to the left than right.
I felt a strange bond toward him. A desire to protect him… wishing my father could be the father for him he couldn’t be for me.
I scrolled some more. There was a newer picture. One I hadn’t seen before. He was holding his new wife in his arms, gaze twinkling as he gazed down at her on the dance floor at someone’s wedding. The status read:
Fourteen years and counting. Love you and our little family to the moon and back.
After closing the laptop, I pushed it away, vowing never to look him up again. I wasn’t going to call him—I refused. I made a promise to myself on New Year’s Eve to stop living for others and to start living for myself. Taking the two-month trip I promised myself to Florida before jumping into a new editing project was the first step in following through with my pledge. Mom didn’t want me to go. It upset her that I was so far away. But I needed space to think. Time to clear my head.
I glanced at the phone with a small, triumphant smile. This year, things were going to change. I was going to change, one hard choice at a time.
I fell asleep comforted by the words from Alone by Edgar Allen Poe, wondering when I’d slay the demon in the cloud.